Carlos the Jackal

Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (12 October 1949-), better known as "Carlos the Jackal", was a Venezuelan political terrorist who was a member of the Arm of the Arab Revolution and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), as well as being a contact of the KGB. Sanchez used the pseudonym "Carlos" to carry out his terrorist attacks for Palestine, and after a Guardian correspondent found "Day of the Jackal" among his possessions, he gained his nickname "Carlos the Jackal". He was later arrested for murdering a French intelligence agent and two counter-intelligence agents.

Biography
Ilich Ramirez Sanchez was born on 12 October 1949 in Michelena, Tachira, Venezuela to a Marxist father who named him after Vladimir Lenin (his middle name was "Ilyich"). In 1966 he attended the Transcontinental Conference with his father, and he spent the summer at Camp Matanzas, a Cuban DGI-run guerrilla warfare camp near Havana, Cuba. In 1968 he enrolled at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, Soviet Union, a notorious hotbed for recruiting foreign communists for the USSR. In 1970 he was expelled.

In July 1970, Sanchez travelled to Beirut, Lebanon, where he joined the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist group. He was trained along with other foreign volunteers in the outskirts of Amman, Jordan, and he studied at the H4 finishing school, run by Iraqi officers near the Syria-Iraq border. He fought in Black September that year, and when the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its PFLP allies were forced out of Jordan, he returned to Lebanon with them. Wadie Haddad trained him, and he took on the pseudonym of "Carlos" and converted to Islam. He later attended courses at the Polytechnic of Central London (University of Westminister) in the United Kingdom, still working for PFLP. In 1973 he tried to assassinate Jewish businessman Joseph Sieff in St. John's Wood in northwest London, firing a bullet at his head while he was in the bath - this was supposed to be revenge for the assassination of Mohamed Boudia by Israel's Mossad in Paris. However, the bullet bounced off his upper lip-nose area, knocking him unconscious. However, his gun jammed forcing him to flee. Carlos failed in a bombing attack on the Bank Hapoalim, and he later headed to France, where he launched car bomb attacks on three pro-Israeli French newspapers. On 13 and 17 January 1975, he failed in RPG attacks on El Al planes at Orly Airport, near Paris.

On 27 June 1975, his PFLP contact Michel Moukharbal gave up his identity under interrogation from the DST, and DST agents headed to a Paris house party, where Carlos was interrogated. Carlos killed the two agents and Moukharbal, and he fled to Beirut through Brussels, Belgium. On 21 December 1975, Carlos carried out the OPEC siege in Vienna, Austria with a six-man PFLP team in an operation that had been planned for a long time. They took over 60 hostages and killed three of them, and 42 hostages were released to Algiers after the Austrians agreed to broadcast a communique about the Palestinian cause every two hours, as Carlos threatened to kill a hostage every 15 minutes. Muammar al-Gaddafi's personal pilot Neville Atkinson flew Carlos, Gabriel Kroecher-Tiedemann, Hans-Joachim Klein, and a number of others to Tripoli in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, where more hostages were released. Carlos took with him $50,000,000 that was paid to him by the Austrians in exchange for releasing the hostages, allegedly paid by Saudi Arabia on the behalf of Iran. Carlos left Algeria for Libya and then South Yemen, where Wadie Haddad fired him for not executing Iranian Minister of Finance Jamshid Amuzgar and Oil Minister of Saudi Arabia Ahmed Zaki Yamani when demands were not met.

In September 1976 he was arrested and detained in Yugoslavia before being flown to Baghdad, Iraq. He founded the Organization of Armed Struggle, connecting with East Germany's Stasi secret police. He was given an office, safe houses in East Berlin, 75 support staff members, a serviced car, and the ability to carry a pistol in public. He planned several attacks in Europe, including the February 1981 attack on Radio Free Europe in Munich. When Bruno Breguet and Carlos' wife Magdalena Kopp, two members of his group, were arrested, he tried to lobby the French government for their release. France refused, so Carlos bombed the Paris-Toulouse TGV train on 29 March 1982, killing 5 and wounding 77; he car-bombed the Libyan newspaper Al-Watan al-Arabi in Paris on 22 April 1982, killing 1 and wounding 63; bombing the Gare Saint-Charles in Marseille on 31 December 1983, killing 2 and wounding 33 and the Marseille-Paris TGV train that same day, killing 3 and wounding 12. Carlos made connections to the Soviet Union's KGB, following Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev's orders to not carry out attacks when he headed to West Germany in 1981. When France bombed a PFLP training camp in Lebanon as a part of the Multinational Force in Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War, Carlos killed 1 man and wounded 22 in the Maison de France in West Berlin, West Germany.

His attacks led to Hungary expelling him from Budapest in 1985, while Iraq, Libya, and Cuba also expelled him. Syria showed him some support, and he settled in Damascus with Magdalena Kopp and their daughter Elba Rosa. In 1990, Ba'athist Iraq approached him for work, and in September 1991, he was expelled from Syria, which supported the United States in its war with Iraq in the Gulf War earlier that year. He was later given sanctuary in Khartoum, Sudan, and in 1994 he underwent a minor testicular operation. Sudanese officials moved him to a villa to "prevent an assassination attempt" and gave him personal bodyguards, but he was tranquilized by them and given to France on 14 August 1994. On 23 December 1997 he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and Carlos lived the rest of his days behind bars.